


Where the Mountains Stop

by jackmarlowe, reckonedrightly



Category: Logan (2017) - Fandom, Wolverine and the X-Men - All Media Types, X-Men (Movieverse), X-Men - All Media Types
Genre: Dementia, Flashbacks, Gay Mutant Road Trip, M/M, Non-Consensual Drug Use, Old Age, Pre-Logan, Trans Character
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-03-29
Updated: 2017-04-23
Packaged: 2018-10-08 12:50:15
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 20,743
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10387014
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jackmarlowe/pseuds/jackmarlowe, https://archiveofourown.org/users/reckonedrightly/pseuds/reckonedrightly
Summary: Caliban is suddenly hyper-aware of the little details Logan’s left in his space — his unfinished coffee mug, the bloody tissues and empty T-gel sachets in the garbage. As if Magneto can sniff these things out as well as him. “How good of him,” he remarks, settling again on Caliban with his calm grey stare and pointedly, it feels, not asking where he fits into the equation. “Where is Charles?”After the Westchester disaster, Logan wants Charles Xavier out of the country. Erik Lehnsherr, newly escaped from prison, has other ideas.





	1. Chapter 1

Everything occurs to him slow here and this, when it bursts into something consequential, is no exception.

At the moment, most thoughts don’t fix themselves long enough to work in soft or restless places. Distantly he understands this is the drug, and resents it sometimes when he has the focus and inclination. He reads magazine articles and leaves no pauses between sittings; he sleeps so often he forgets he’s old, and knows better than to wonder at this inevitable strange banality slipping through his fingers; he walks, talks, and stretches himself enough to keep himself intact. The rest is largely spent in passing.

Not so this, today – there it is an ache behind his breastbone like someone’s insistent fingertip is there and pulling, slow. He licks his lips, pauses with his arm drawn across his chest – there, arm across his stark jumpsuit front, his body his own and there – and considers rubbing the spot for a few seconds until abruptly it moves to his toes hanging off the side of the cot. The cot, the concrete floor dark-stained, his own fucking space just beyond his feet: he tries to take it all in at once but there it is again, a thing within his body and also just beyond it, brief and moving with a gait.

He realises with the introduction of footsteps that there’s a corresponding sound. In these rattling seconds his body and mind have nothing to do with it. Instinct roars this something, this thing, into a guttural screech.

He blinks where he stands hunch-shouldered and unsteady: his dinner tray has come through the door shutter; the pressure in his chest might snap his ribs and so he looks down and sees the thing in his palm and learns to breathe again. His brain, horrible with abrupt clarity, provides the word in the language he runs through his mind when he’s alone. _Eine Reißwecke._ His own voice sounds very unfamiliar to the inside of his head. It’s enough, he thinks – _what for?_

Erik opens his hands deliberately. The pin does not fall; the lack of sound rushes in and clarifies the edges of the room. Eight steps by six. The harsh white fluorescent that goes off at nine o’clock and gives the impression of perpetual nighttime. The plastic toilet and the blanket he folded automatic in the morning like someone with military training, though the impulse comes from another place. The folds in his white jumpsuit, which does not quite fit him after six months on a diet meant for men three decades younger. The small dot of brass that settles quiet into his creased palm and thunders in his chest.

It is enough – he’s done it with less, even in places where they didn’t know who he was. Erik tips his head back, feels his spine creak and his hips jolt, coughs to hear himself in there and _pulls_ . The tack erupts from its shape and the thin edge of bootheel rubber and oh, there, there, _there_ -

There’s imagination to what he does, though Erik doesn’t think enough to make it an intentional choice. The guards’ heads depart their bodies almost precisely in time, drawn apart by a cheap spun brass thread; plastic parts in exact fractions and splinters underneath his rubber soles. For a while the thread scrabbles frustrated on the surface of doors and then learns to slip straight through as a bullet, to take its time, and after some working he can taste steel so abrupt and sharp it goes through his skull. There.

He’s tired, Erik realises; this morning’s pills are still in his system, and he hasn’t departed from the routine long enough to know how much time it will take. There’s steel two or three corridors over and up but even straining so hard his fingers twitch he can’t pull it down, and here he is standing in the middle of a harsh-lit corridor, the bodies of two guards sprawled some hundred feet through the clawed-through door and an alarm going off somewhere and recycled fucking orthopaedics on his feet. His breath is rasping in his throat, which is probably not positive. Perhaps he should’ve eaten dinner first.

“ _Stop!_ ”

His fist closes instinctively and wrenches sideways, but the gun pointed at the end of the corridor is plastic – an established thing, a stupid thing to forget. The uniformed woman’s jaw clenches and he slashes the burrowing scrap of metal sideways, jamming it awkward and hasty into the base of her neck. She puts a knee down, curses, her fingers scrabbling over messy red and the gun going off loud and too close.

Erik hauls himself past her, hand to the wall, and is briefly stumped by the keypad. The rest of her body hits the floor behind him and he remembers; she glances at him as if distracted as he reaches down with difficulty and pulls the blood-smeared plastic keycard from her pocket. She brought him his breakfast two days ago, he recognises distantly. Looks like you people can’t stop fucking killing each other, she’d said, but lightly. A newspaper folded beside his plate. Always very polite.

There are more of them coming down the elevator; he can see plastic helmets and riot shields shining through the grate as it descends. He wipes the card on his jumpsuit, swipes it through the door, inhales the proximity of steel and on this giddying high brings a girder through the wall six floors up and slices through the elevator cable. After this Erik has to sit down for a while and catch his breath.

He knows he’ll do it, now, but no one seems to be coming other than the human security forces, and he cannot remember if this should be startling or not. Easy enough to pull for scraps and find tiny fragments to function as bullets – this is his oldest trick – though to his slight anxiety he finds he can’t move more than one at once, and hears them clattering around their boots on the stairs. He has to let them get closer to see him and then it’s very fucking obvious there is something wrong with him, which he can’t abide. A guttural noise rips through his throat and the scraps contract into a rough boulder that sends bodies against the walls and slams through the elevator shaft door.

It’s here, steel on his tongue and fresh air drifting inevitable through his dry lips, that he hears the whisper of a question – _Erik_ – and has the clarity to suspect there is something to this timing.

“In a moment, Charles,” he rasps aloud, and lets the metal pull his limbs into something slow but coherent.  


* * *

  
The blinds are open, and the afternoon sun soaks through Charles’ eyelids. Outside there is the sound of traffic; inside, the weekendy chatter of radio hosts. Every noise is muted and muddied. Charles casts an arm out in waking, but when his eyes open he can’t remember what he was reaching for. His ears feel stuffed and swollen and his throat is dry. Perhaps he is coming down with something. Such a pain. And Jean will want to know, if Jean doesn’t already; a telepath and a doctor, such a nosy combination.

 _Small business loans are available now_ , the radio host remarks. Another says, _and thanks especially to our guest host. Casualties confirmed. Greatest hits of the eighties. You should have seen it coming. Three for the price of one, folks: there’s never been a better time to buy!_

There’s something wrong. He’s lying on bobbled and faded fabric-covered sofa cushions which smell of cigarette smoke. They’re part of a pull-out futon which should have been gotten rid of years ago. The radios must be stacked just out of sight, just beyond the cracked-open door, just where Charles can’t crane his neck to see out into the corridor on account of the pain that shoots from his fingertips to his shoulder then fishhooks up around his right eye. He tries to listen for the other thing, but can’t remember what the other thing is, and then he forgets to even try to remember. He feels it slide from his grasp. He gets the shape of its absence.

His breath is coming quicker now. Sharp tugs in his chest. It doesn’t feel like the air he inhales is hitting his lungs properly.

His chair is across the room. He rolls and grunts as his shoulder hits the floor. Puts his hands in fists on the splintering floorboards and hauls himself a few inches forward. Pain snaps through his left shoulder and he cries out. The radios scream static and talk over each other: playing Kajagoogoo, advertising a pizza joint and talking about fear. There are footsteps banging outside the door and then it swings open.

Charles tries to crane up to see but his arms collapse under him and all he gets is the sight of boots below the dirty cuffs of old jeans. “Goddammit,” says an unfamiliar voice. The stranger crouches – greying dark hair, a grizzled beard, looks like someone left him out in the sun too long. Looks like one of those people who will just never look clean no matter how much they scrub. He grabs Charles and scoops him up easily. As if with practice.

“Get your hands off me,” Charles spits, twisting uselessly against the stranger’s grip. He’s dropped back onto the cushions, a hand spread on his chest pushing him down.

The person staring down at him is doing so with a mix of fear and concern and anger. And Charles doesn’t recognise him, but he knows that expression. Again he feels the dizzying expanse of a loss he can’t articulate, just beyond his grasp.

The stranger takes his hand off Charles’ chest. It doesn’t make it much easier to breathe. Under his arm, Charles sees that lurking in the doorway is another man, his arms folded tight. His skin is pasty white and his mouth is pinched and skewed with disapproval and concern. Charles looks back to the man leaning over him. “Where is this?” he croaks.

“Somewhere safe.”

“Safe,” Charles snaps. “Oh, yes, I’m sure even the rats avoid this place.” He raises his hands; they’re blackened with grime after his brief attempt to cross the floorboards. Then he puts the first two fingers of his right hand to his temple. It’s automatic.

The man leaning over him says, “That won’t work. Don’t try. You’ll just fuck yourself up.”

“Take me back to my school,” Charles says, with a listless flex of an old mental muscle, reaching sneaking tendrils out as cursorily as he might wave a hand.

Nothing happens.

Charles realises what he’s not hearing. Behind this man’s eyes he picks up only the occasional burble of thought and it’s half drowned out by the radio noise. It sounds, if anything, like speech underwater. He can’t reach in or pull back. The mutter of the stranger’s mind is just beyond his grasp and absolutely stationary there: twittering, useless, taunting. Behind the eyes of the man in the doorway is only silence.

He seizes the collar of the stranger’s shirt with both hands and hauls his face down so that his own forehead connects with the other’s nose. There’s a crunch and a yell.

There are no radios in the room. There’s never been a better time to invest in life insurance, a radio advert nonetheless tells him.  


* * *

  
“Do me a favour and put on a shirt that's not caked in blood before you go out to try to buy a car without a paper trail.”

“I’ll keep my jacket on,” says Logan, who hadn't noticed the stains on his sleeve from where he'd wiped it across his face. His nose has snapped back into place but not without the usual pain and fatigue healing a broken bone usually involves – just all condensed into seconds, instead of months.

“Does he usually headbutt?” Caliban asks him.

“He doesn't usually wake up in unfamiliar places.”

Caliban studies him for a moment, which Logan catches and resists commenting on, preferring to redouble his efforts as he looks for the keys Caliban has promised him are somewhere in the pile of papers on the apartment's milk-crate coffee table.

“He’s been here for three days now,” Caliban says. No answer from Logan but a slight shift in his weight, a tightening of his shoulders. “Logan. This can’t be easy for you.”

“I'm not going to have this conversation.”

“Not willingly or politely, at least.”

The papers are proofreading sheets. Caliban will do just about any kind of work that allows him to remain inside at all times. His handwriting is neat and cramped and fussy. “Stop,” Logan says.

“It's not your fault he's reacting badly, you know. I don't know exactly what you want me to do about it, but fine. I already said I'd help.”

“You have five _fucking_ possessions and you still lose your goddamn — you know what, open it from the inside when I come back.”

“Oh, sure,” Caliban says, his voice suddenly gliding high with passive aggression as he gives up on his clumsy probing into _what’s wrong Logan, do you want to talk Logan_. Good. Logan doesn’t want to talk and Caliban isn’t the listener he thinks he is. “I'll just be here.”

“Great. You _literally_ have nothing better to do,” Logan says, and he knows exactly what Caliban is going to say about that – about at the very least having the decency not to poke at his pride, about unspoken memorandums of understanding, politeness, and perhaps also about the fact that Logan has _literally_ no one else – so he walks out and closes the door, letting it lock. Caliban is probably muttering to himself behind it. He doesn't need an audience to feel he's had the last word. Logan is just happy not to hear it.

Better now than fucking never. He’s had the envelope of money pressed against his ribs for three days now and Caliban will let him in eventually.

Logan stomps the three blocks to the subway in the cold and dials thoughtlessly on the platform to give his hands something to do. The first number he’s saved on the cheap plastic phone flicks instantly to the familiar voicemail:

_Hello, you’ve reached—_

He jams the phone back in his pocket just as the F Train arrives in a screaming snarl of noise and hot sound that’s at odds with the winter up there. Stupid to even try – he breathes out hard through his still-sore nose under the subway’s bellow and steps inside, taking a place by the door with his face to the window and his arm jammed between anyone else and his expression. Focus.

There’s a refugee violinist and her daughter at the end of the carriage with a handwritten cardboard sign – NO HOME FOR TWO YEARS, PLEASE HELP – and tattered sandals on their feet. She’s playing Beethoven up-tempo with her eyes down the other end, clocking him briefly as the biggest man on the train and flicking away. The girl, who looks about eight or nine and wears a dirty God Bless America sweatshirt that’s three sizes too big for her, walks quiet down the line and gets stares, the odd murmured handful of change from some of the older folks. She hovers briefly at his end and looks away with a learned version of her mother’s caution when Logan finds himself glancing back, though he’s spent the change in his pockets topping up his metrocard.

He was homeless in Manhattan himself, briefly, during the first Depression. He’d slept in a churchyard on the Lower East Side and worked on the docks during the day and spoken to no one and stopped drinking, for a time – he remembers that but not why he’d come to the city in the first place. Probably it was much easier to sleep out then. The summer got so hot that people were spilling onto the streets, jobless and drinking and restless, and the cops were too on edge to care about drifters. One of the last few years you could really get away with calling yourself a communist in this country. It seems much longer than nearly a century ago, and he’d know. His ageing has not gone the way of Charles and his terrifying wide-eyed fucking dementia.

 _Fucking focus_ , Logan – but the voice in his head is Storm’s, suddenly, and the lilting pitch of the violin over the uneven screech of the train is abruptly too much and Logan finds himself panting by the time they reach the next station. He practically flees aboveground at Washington Square, taking the steps two at a time despite the ache in his knees.

There are a few oil drum fires flickering in the Square around the chainlink fence that circles the fountain, the stone cracked and stained with flare residue from last year’s demos. The snow’s lingering as compact, dirty blocks of ice and the air bites deep enough for Logan to turn up the collar of his leather jacket. He glances around quick at the crosswalk and does the rounds of the oil drums briskly, nodding at the human faces he recognises and ignoring the rest.

There are three of them towards the south end of the park, not spread out this afternoon as they usually are but standing close around the same fire. They glance up as one; an instinct, Logan recognises, that people who spend time around telepaths or who have a particularly bad time with police share. Shoving his hands further into his pockets to keep out the chill, he hunches his shoulders like one of their usual clients would and sidesteps over.

Bri is a tall trans woman with dreadlocks, a trenchcoat, and tattoos on her eyelids that, Logan’s been informed, said BAD BITCH the last time she bothered getting them touched up. She looks him over carefully and nods without moving her hands from the fire, where she’s letting the flames weave and flick between her long fingers. “Hey,” she grunts.

“Hey.”

“This shit true, Wolverine?” Like his companions, the telepath whose name Logan’s forgotten is formerly of the crowd that marked their gifts on their skin – the edge of a tattooed sword peeks from a cheap partial skin graft at his temple, matching the rose on his girlfriend Ivy’s wrist. He’s always chewing in a way that makes Logan suspect he samples his own wares, but probably so do half the people in a few hundred yards’ radius. “What we been hearing from upstate?”

Logan keeps focused on Bri and leans against the barrel to speak over the crackle and hiss of the fire. “I need three sets of new papers,” he says quietly. “Expedited. I got cash. And a car, too – something all-wheel drive."

Ivy barks a short, incredulous laugh and paws at her jacket pocket for cigarettes. “Oh, man. Oh, Jesus. That’s a fucking yes, babies – in case you missed that. That whole school, huh?” She holds out the packet; Logan can just about shake his head stiffly. “All them fucking rich kids?”

“There weren’t any kids anymore,” Logan snaps, and instantly regrets it. The less word that gets out on the street, the better – more likely these days that mutants will get gossipy with humans, and before he knows it they’ll have Caliban on the six o’clock news.

There’s little warning as the telepath brushes curiously at the front of his mind. It’s the same sensation as if he’d laid the back of his hand against his forehead, like taking his temperature, but Logan rears back like he’s been hauled across the mouth and puts his hands up, sees claws before he can choose. The telepath’s jaw goes tight and he pulls away from the fire – Bri clicks her tongue coolly, her gaze not faltering from Logan.

“Chill out, Waste,” she says curtly. “This boy’s used to better mindfucks than you. I can set you up with my car guy easy — what kind of docs you wantin’?”

He breathes until the claws slide back and keeps it brief, handing over the envelope with their photos and details – his own ten years old, different facial hair, Charles’ recent and pale-vacant, Caliban looking pinched and wary at the camera flash. Bri lifts a hand from the fire, trailing a lick of flame with her that circles her wrist once and vanishes, to skim through; she takes her time looking at each page and finally nods.

“Five grand up front. Family discount,” she adds wryly, the emphasis on something other than what the four of them have in common. Logan feels an abrupt twinge in his back and hands over the money silently; he can feel Ivy and Waste’s eyes sitting curious and calculating on his hips and his height at he turns away from the fleeting warmth of the drum, and wishes he’d taken three fucking cigarettes for his trouble.

It’s only four o’clock but he heads for a bar, the recently bought-out Irish one a few blocks over on Eighth that’s closing down for good next week. He feels vaguely nauseous after the telepath and there’s no point in going home yet – Charles, with any luck, with be asleep and Caliban will be anxious or unsettlingly quiet or both, and Logan does not feel fucking equipped to deal with either without whiskey on board. He hasn’t had a drink or any real sleep in three days.

He takes a booth in a dark corner and checks his phone not out of any habit but because it feels heavy and unnatural in his jeans pocket. A burner, Caliban called it, right after calling him ancient for never having owned anything more complicated than a Nokia before. There’s nothing waiting for him, of course, but Logan scrolls through the brief list of contacts again and memorises the numbers of the people he knows for certain are dead. The ones who lived in the mansion all share an area code; the three numbers pulse horribly as he whispers the sequences to himself and lets this fade into his head, to tap out with his nail on the warped hardwood table. Burner phones, Caliban explained, are meant to be used and thrown away, which means that once he’s done with the SIM card these numbers will cease to exist beyond some file or other behind a desk he’s not supposed to know about. Logan has a weird and dangerous compulsion to keep them, though another drink and another blur this intention into a more straightforward kind of mourning.

The bartender brings him another whiskey on the house – for being a valued member of the family, he says. Logan wrinkles his nose and slaps down the same tip as last time regardless. Family discount, his ass.

This is one of the few places he’s come with Caliban. Not that they’ve ever _gone out_ but it used to feel good, coming here late at night – just drinking amidst the other middle-aged-looking men, deliberately in the last place in the Village they’d bump into others like them, Logan with an eye on the football game and Caliban glancing over halfhearted, the edges of his lips curling into an occasional laugh as he let Logan buy the drinks to avoid stares. It’d felt like the furthest place in the world from Westchester and it only cost twelve bucks on the late bus.

Another full day in New York, he reckons. Two at most, if Bri’s services aren’t up to par, and then he’ll remember what it’s really like to be on the road again, but now he’s thinking of Westchester and Charles’ strange, helpless plea is in his head and leaving no room for numbers or passports or Google Maps routes or the price of a bus ticket: _I want to go home. Please, I want to go home.  
_

* * *

  
Caliban is answering surveys for coupons on a massive, whirring, dinosaur-slow laptop when he feels a buzz in the back of his skull. It hums, not exactly uncomfortable, and then it spikes, and then it’s gone, all in a matter of seconds. He looks towards the doorframe, and hears Charles move. Not so bad, he thinks warily. Maybe that sort of thing is more common than the seizures. Maybe he won’t get caught in the crossfire like so many others.

Maybe, maybe. It’s not much to hope for but that’s nothing new.

He should probably help, he realises belatedly. He rises, pokes his head into the door, and clears his throat. Charles is pushing himself up in slow, effortful movements, so that he can lean against the wall. Caliban says, “Are you…?” but doesn’t finish the sentence aloud because it ends in ‘lucid’. There’s something mortifying, miserable, about watching Charles Xavier struggle.

But: “Yes,” Charles snaps. “I’m done sleeping. I’m not a fucking corpse yet. Help me up.”

So Caliban does, though he suspects Logan would refuse to. It’s clumsy and awkward though Charles is frighteningly light. When he transfers him over to the chair the wheels roll and bounce and Charles makes a scornful noise. “Good _Christ_ — this is your job now, I understand? Oh yes, I remember you, don’t look so squirrely. First lesson: the wheels lock for a reason. I’m not a sack of potatoes.” Then he puts both hands on the wheels and rolls forward, so that Caliban has to jump out of the way.

He’d always sort of wanted to meet Professor X.

Charles has gone to the window. He says, without turning, “Piss off now. No — wait. Where is he?”

“Logan?”

“No, no. Not Logan.” Charles has become animated again. He wheels around. “The other one. He was here earlier.”

Caliban’s tongue feels leaden, and he tries to work out if it’s best to explain that Logan simply hasn’t shaved in a while, has been drinking too much, looks different, or if it’s kinder to just go with it. After a moment, he manages to say, “There was no one else here earlier,” and then gasps and shudders to feels something like a thread unspooling beneath his temple. “ _Don’t—_ ”

Days rattle backwards like the cars of a train. Glimpses of something else in the gaps. Sitting on a bed in a pale yellow room, looking around and not really believing this place is his. Vans in the night with the headlights off. Bulletproof vests. Blackout curtains and SAD lamps. Monthly salary. Awkwardly asking, do I — so do I pay _tax_ on this or? Doxxed. Brick through the window. Moved in the night. Panic attacks in the shower. Nice phone with three contacts. Panic attacks in the street. Hundreds of different lives looked into, like bright islands on a black sea, sweet and bitter lives, some strange, some beautifully mundane, all alluring — all extinguished, or taken somewhere he couldn’t follow.

Charles releases him and slumps forward. The release comes with recoil: Caliban staggers. The room fills with the sound of both their ragged breathing. Then Caliban sets his teeth and moves forward, saying, “You _can’t_ do that,” he says, not knowing if he means Charles shouldn’t or shouldn’t be able to. He’s on enough suppressants. Logan left a pack on the windowsill. He starts towards it. His legs aren’t steady. “You’ll overstretch yourself. Don’t — please don’t try.”

“You stink of guilt,” Charles mutters. His face is drained of colour, his head lolling back against the headrest of the chair. Caliban looks away as he passes. “It pervades you. That’s why you’re doing — whatever you and Logan are doing now. I’m — what’s happened?” His voice is whisperish and weak; there’s a pleading, exhausted note in it now. “Why are we here? What’s happened?”

Caliban pops two of the suppressant tablets from their foil packaging. “Here. These will help. Here.”

“No, no, tell me…”

“These will help. You’re in pain, right?” The words tumble out of his mouth and he shudders to hear himself—pressing an old man on his hurts, lying about what the pills will do. His hands are shaking so badly he almost drops the tablets. “You must be. You hurt your shoulder. It’s not bad, but. Look, just take these. I’ll get you some water.”

Charles remains silent, holding the pills in the palm of his hand. Caliban feels watched as he stumbles from the room. He returns and Charles is still holding the pills. His eyes are glazed and his mouth crooked. Caliban says, “I didn’t have a choice.” But that’s weak. Charles blinks, looks at him without interest, then sighs and swallows the pills. He doesn’t take the water Caliban offers him, or respond to anything further. In jerky movements, he turns his chair around to the window, and reaches for the blinds. “No,” Caliban says. “I can’t. Sorry. Please don’t. Even if I’m not here. I need to be able to come in. If you need me.”

Charles drops his hand. Caliban goes.

He sits on the sofa and answers the question: _how does KitKat™ make you feel?_ His fingers feel numb. He tries to concentrate on the questions and not the long succession of days and nights which Charles has fanned open like a hand of cards for a cursory inspection. The guilt is never gone but sometimes it scabs over. Charles has dug his fingers in and peeled the wound afresh.

Logan’s offer is a good one considering his situation. A place to go, somewhere and someone to take care of. Two people, he amends: Logan has not said anything, obviously, in fact Caliban very much doubts he’s even consciously considered it, but Caliban knows very well he’s not just being asked to look after Charles.

 _What colours do you associate with KitKat™?_ Red, Caliban answers.

Charles is sporadic, variously vicious and terrified, and worst of all he is sometimes quite lucid, with or without memories; Logan has told him that he will probably improve once the after-effects of whatever he did fade, that he was doing much better before, that no one could have anticipated — well, Logan says a lot of things. Charles fights the suppressants, the painkillers and the people trying to care for him. Logan, similarly, resents no one like those who try to stand in the way of his wished-for self-destruction. Caliban is essentially signing up to drag both of them away from the brink.

He finishes the survey and finds another. Charles’ wheels creak on the floorboard in the next room. He hears him start to snore. That gives him pause, his fingers stilling on the keyboard. It’s been a while since other people have been in his space. Logan only ever really stays for a night or two at most, and the rhythm of his nightmares are enough like what his own used to be.

A place and people. A domestic desert fantasy, playing house with Wolverine and Professor X. Even knowing that he’s being asked to play liferope, over and over, until he’s worn through with people grabbing at him—even knowing that—the idea has an appeal. It infuriates him, but he can’t help it.

The apartment door unlocks and clicks open behind Caliban as he taps out his thoughts on an advert for a miserable-looking period drama. Footsteps on the floorboards. “I don’t suppose you thought to pick up food,” Caliban says, and then winces, regrets his acid tone, but doesn’t know how to take it back. His heartrate isn’t down, not really, and his fingers aren’t much more steady than they were ten minutes ago. He can still almost taste something familiar, a mutant trace he hunted once.

He puts the laptop off his lap. And three things hit him at once. One: Logan did not take the key. Two: that is not Logan’s scent. Three: it is not Logan’s voice that says, “My apologies. I didn’t have the time.”

Caliban stands and turns and takes a step back.

He has never met the man who stands in the doorway before, but he does know his face — from the news, from his old work, from the T-shirts that young mutants and some rebellious young humans wore back in the day. He had thought he would be a little taller, a little less stooped, and a little more imprisoned.

“Don’t worry,” Magneto says. “I’m not here on business.”

Sitting in the back of an unmarked van, eyes closed and scenting: Caliban had once found him on the orders of someone who paid well. But they hadn’t met. Magneto had been bundled into a separate containment vehicle. It was safer that way. Less metal to grab. And it was said that Magneto remembered faces the way some humans did — photographic and with the patience of someone who could commit to long-term vengeance. Watching him now like this, grey-haired and dressed in tatty, mis-matched clothes that smell from here but hawk-sharp despite his red-rimmed eyes, Caliban realises what he means by _business_ and nearly sits down.

“You’re—” He clears his throat. “Who told—”

“Where is he?” His voice is not like TV – it’s cracked and hoarse like people’s get when they leave solitary, but his tone is level like his gaze. He takes a step further inside.

Panic bubbles to a near-laugh as it occurs to Caliban to actually say _Who?_ , like something out of a bad sitcom. _Who me?_ He pushes his tongue against his front teeth and cautiously does sit, testing the waters. “Logan’s taking care of him,” he says quietly. “He’ll be back soon.”

Magneto’s lips twitch into an amused smile that looks odd on his sunken face. He glances once around the flat and Caliban is suddenly hyper-aware of the little details Logan’s left in his space — his unfinished coffee mug, the bloody tissues and empty T-gel sachets in the garbage. As if Magneto can sniff these things out as well as him and it’s embarrassing, or something. “How good of him,” he remarks, settling again on Caliban with his calm grey stare and pointedly, it feels, not asking where he fits into the equation. “Where is Charles?”

“Sleeping.”

“Show me.”

Caliban considers this. While the escaped convict look does not look exactly sane on Magneto, here is someone older in this business than Logan — and the timing is just so that suggests he’s well aware of what he’s dealing with. Charles’ reaction is another matter, but at least he’s already taken his pills.

“Did you hear about what happened?”

“Yes,” Magneto says curtly, and suddenly the smile is gone, the lines of his face less those of an indulgent great-uncle’s. “Show me where he is.”

“Can I ask,” Caliban tries (for Logan’s sake, he thinks, and immediately hates himself for rationalising), “what you want with him?”

He raises an eyebrow and behind him the door swings shut again loud enough to be a reminder, the lock clicking back into place. “Are you going to stop me, tracker?”

That is — that is a good point. The desert domestic fantasy begins to blow away like sand. Caliban wets his lips and nods towards the door to the next room. He watches Magneto move over to it — slowly, as if hurting, or perhaps just tired — and enter inside.  


* * *

  
Logan is not expecting his phone to vibrate. He looks at it with suspicion. The text is from Caliban, and predictably vague.

_Problem. Get home ASAP._

He downs his whiskey and stands, torn between two contradictory angers: one, _what did you do_ , and the other, almost sure this is nothing Caliban actually needs him to deal with, why do you think I can help?  


* * *

  
Charles is asleep in his chair, his head turned slightly, his eyelids trembling a little. There's a lamp with a broken shade in the corner; the room's only illumination, because the blinds are tightly drawn.

Charles looks different now to even the recent pictures of him. The TV and the newspapers are using subdued, professional, respectable pictures from the school website and keynote addresses. For the shock value: look what this man did. Now Charles looks more tired, more frighteningly frail. Erik does not suppose that he himself looks any better.

The only thing that could be used as a bed in the room is a folded-out futon without even a sheet stretched over its dusty cushions. It is far too close to the ground to be easily reached from the wheelchair. This — and that lingering thought, how the television reporters put tragic, sombre masks over their delight in a mutant causing destruction, all of them salivating at a fresh story — makes Erik's gut twist with anger. Were his powers fully recovered from the drugs then perhaps the window fittings, the door handle, the chair's frame would rattle in a little warning tremble of anger. But there's stillness.

He exhales, and has to catch himself against the wall, head drooping. He hasn’t slept for more than a four hour stint, and this after the near-narcolepsy of his slow-filtering prison days. He’s eaten once, cold sandwiches from a gas station. He has been moving towards this point for over twenty four hours. At one point he almost suspected that Charles was doing more than providing a homing point, and was intentionally reeling him in with his powers. But he is not so sure. He knows very well all the things that determination can force a body to do. Now all that energy has left him at once and his knees feel weak.

Charles' eyes open. He frowns, uncricking his neck with a quiet pop, wincing. His movements are slow and tentative. And out of habit, Erik braces himself for the flicker of quickly-retracted connection. Usually the first thing Charles does upon waking is reach out to find every mind close to his — he does it as instinctively as anyone else would open their eyes. Erik knows this, has felt this. The routine is like this: a door nudged open, a mental flicker of vague apology, or sometimes Charles actually mumbling, “Ah, sorry,” or sometimes both at once in muddled harmony. And peace, returning, and Charles, waking.

Not this time. Erik doesn’t feel anything. Some of his energy returns with concern. He straightens, keeps his hand on the wall but pushes away from it slightly. “Charles?”

“Erik,” Charles says, smiling though he looks exhausted. His eyes are open and his mind is not searching — or all those pills, all those regimens, all those needles have not only muzzled Erik’s own powers, they’ve made it harder for him to feel the subtle insinuations of Charles’ mutation.  “A sight for sore eyes.”

“I came to—” Erik stops. Words stutter at the back of his throat. There are pills on the windowsill. He recognises the packaging.

It’s not that _he’s_ been forcefed too many suppressants.

The foil-wrapped sheet of tablets skids out of the box into his hand. Charles says hazily, “Erik, what—” and Erik turns on his heel, throws the door open. Throws his free hand out. Here is the part where all the metal in the room would begin to shake, here is when locks break, pacemakers fizzle, fillings all-too-slowly rotate in gums — none of that happens.

But Caliban’s laptop snaps down on his fingers and Caliban makes a strangled, anguished noise which he quickly cuts off.

“Traitor,” Erik hisses, and pushes the laptop screen further down as slowly as he can. It’s always so much harder to do this slowly rather than than quickly. But it’s worth it. He blinks sweat out of his eyes. His breath is coming hard. “You and Logan. Snivelling, self-hating traitors. How much could have been avoided with a little self-respect, I wonder?”

“Erik,” Charles says, and grabs his wrist. His fingers are cold and both his grip and voice are weak. “Please. If you could once in your life resist it. _Don’t_ be an arse.”

Caliban’s teeth are tight together, his lips peeled back. He’s silent and wide-eyed and staring at Erik with defiance and pain etched on his features. Distantly Erik wonders if perhaps he’s dealt with torture before, perhaps in similar circumstances. Retribution for his sins.

“He’s drugged you,” Erik says, not looking at Charles. “You’re welcome to forgive him that. But _I_ —”

“We have a journey ahead of us, and your tantrums are not a welcome fucking start — you stubborn old bastard, _turn it off!"_

Erik realises, suddenly, that he is losing his grip on the laptop. It’s metal encased in plastic. Usually that doesn’t matter. Now it does. He’s slipping. His breathing is coming hard. He has two choices: visibly fail, or allow Charles to believe he’s talked him down.

Caliban gives a sharp short cry as the laptop snaps open. He curls into himself. The laptop screen is cracked and blackened. It falls to the floor with a thud.

Charles grips Erik’s wrist tighter for a moment, then almost throws his hand back at him in releasing his hold. He says curtly, almost a sneer, “ _Thank_ you.” Then he sighs, and repeats, “Thank you,” in quite a different tone—lowered and more private, gently resigned. He wheels out past Erik, towards the door.

Erik glances to where Caliban is curled, trying not to whimper. It’s a familiar sound. He tosses the strip of pills at him and they bounce off Caliban’s knee. “Take them all,” he advises. “You aren’t one of us.”

At the door now, Charles says, “Erik,” warning, exasperated, not as horrified as perhaps he has been in the past. That’s a familiar sound too. Echoes, Erik thinks. We are all just echoing. “Erik? Come along.”  


* * *

  
Logan hauls himself up the too-many flights of stairs. He’s not sure it’s quicker than the elevator but it could be, and it makes him feel more in control. He doesn’t like hanging around in boxes. But the problem can’t be imminent danger or Caliban would have either called or been unable to grab his phone at all. Right?

 _Whats the problem_ , Logan had texted back.

 _Not going to say over text_ , Caliban had responded curtly. Caliban has ideas about things like data security and encryption. Usually Logan remains off the grid by never really getting onto it. Caliban considers this ‘impractical’, ‘old-fashioned’ and ‘bullshit’.

So nothing can be that urgent, Logan guesses. He reaches the landing, and doesn’t have to knock; Caliban opens the door. “So,” Caliban says the moment he does so, not even stepping back; “let’s get this out of the way. The Professor is gone.”

“What the _fuck_?” Before Logan knows it he’s shoved Caliban back with both hands, and he has to stop himself going and looking — as if maybe Caliban’s just entertaining a particularly sick joke, and it wouldn’t be completely impossible — but Caliban looks awful, eyes reddened and his mouth slack in that particular way that means he’s got guilt up to the back teeth and has decided to deal with it, in his perverse, downright whiny way, by owning up to it. As if speaking the name of the sin were the greater part of absolution. There are long broken strips of bruise across his fingers that weren’t there before, and his left ring finger in particular is swollen and bluish. “What the fuck do you mean, gone? What, he just fucking — left?”

The door swings closed. Caliban shrugs, a little sullen, and says, “He was...picked up. Did you — just out of interest, Logan — did you not know that Magneto, _fucking Magneto_ , was out of prison and planning to come reclaim his old pal, or did you just fail to mention — ugh!”

Logan’s left fist is tight in Caliban’s shirt collar. He twists, pulls up. Caliban wheezes and glares at him, passive and sneering. Caliban is afraid of pain, Logan knows, but not of violence. He has never so much as blinked when Logan has gotten in his face, and Logan has gotten in his face many times. He bitches for hours if he stubs his toe but doesn’t react to adamantium claws in his face, like at some point in his miserable history something just snapped and nothing was ever frightening again. Logan hates it, hates how blank and cold he goes. “You,” Logan says, “let _Magneto_ just waltz the fuck in here—”

“What was I meant to do?”

“And you’re acting like this is my fault? Like it’s my fucking fault? You—”

“Lay down my life, whatever the hell that’s worth? What was I meant to do, Logan?”

“Something! Something better than this, you little prick!”

“Come on then,” Caliban says, hanging limp in Logan’s harsh grip, lip hitched up and eyes reptilian. “What? Are you going to hit me? Hm?”

Logan throws him back, turns, swings his fist at the wall. There’s a metal screech. Three long gouges. Drywall, ashy powder, dust, puffs up in the air like smoke. “ _Fuck_ ,” he says, claws still embedded in the wall. He tries to yell it but his voice cracks, and he starts coughing. He dashes at his mouth with his left sleeve. “Fuck. You fucking…”

Caliban is standing, hip against the back of the sofa, his arms folded tight. “Yeah,” he says, staring at the ceiling. “I’m sorry. But—”

“But what? What mitigating circumstance are you going to pull out of your ass this time?” Logan says, yanking his claws out of the wall.

Slowly, very slowly, Caliban looks down from the ceiling and meets Logan’s aggrieved stare with a flat look. “Mag,” he says slowly, “neto.”

“He’s got to be — he’s _older_ than Charles, isn’t he? You useless sack of shit!”

“Fuck you,” Caliban says curtly. “I never volunteered to die for anyone.”

“Yeah, no shit,” Logan spits, advancing. Still, Caliban doesn’t waver. Logan hates it, it’s like missing a step. Vertiginous. And because Caliban doesn’t flinch Logan has to keep on crowding him, getting close to his face, staring him right in his too-calm eyes. An emerging possibility strikes him: “Jesus Christ. You — did you palm Charles off on him? Did you want this? Two birds, one stone? Fuck me, Caliban, what is _wrong_ with you?”

Caliban’s face hardens and he says, in his politest and nastiest tone, “Not all of us run towards every opportunity to get ourselves killed, Logan. Not all of us leap for joy when—”

“Fuck you!”

“If you want my help tracking them down, try lowering your _fucking_ voice as a first step.”

“I don’t need your help,” Logan says, which is a lie. He steps away, kicks over the milk-crate coffee table on his way to the door. “I don’t need any fucking part of you.” He slams the door behind him. At the exact moment that it closes he remembers he doesn’t have a key.  


* * *

  
They clear the city in the early morning. When night fades and a few things come back to him, Charles remembers this, of all things:

Not the last time they saw one another by any means; it could’ve been any of the times in the Seventies when Erik wore a slight beard and ran from the government. Charles caught him occasionally, when his helmet was off and his guard down; often he kept his word and let him slide by but sometimes he couldn’t resist a glimpse. A beach, a basement. Sirens tangling up with laughter and toes blue from sleeping in a winter attic with frosted windows. Erik hated the cold, Charles knew well, but it was where people were less inclined to go looking.

The CIA asked, occasionally but politely, and it wasn’t exactly a lie to say he hadn’t made contact with Erik Lehnsherr for over a year, though perhaps it was a federal crime not to disclose his suspicions that Erik was in a particularly freezing and alcoholic part of the Soviet Union. Charles drew a distinction between general telepathy and active communication – the latter took work and usually the range of Cerebro. When he was younger, he’d almost wished for a kind of handbook for telepaths beyond the rules he made for himself. Erik had clarified those and formalised them, eventually, by shutting him out; I’ll be the one to decide when, he’d said, smile hovering between something familiar and a sneer. A little mental variety for you, Charles.

So there he was at Oxford, a decade and a half after he’d left the town behind and rubbed off the more offensively posh edges of his accent – later he’d suppose that of course this place where nothing changed would be the perfect place to throw him for a loop. Charles still got the occasional invitation to speak, though he hadn’t published in years; his monograph on mutation was, inevitably, still the leading work in the field. Pembroke couldn’t accommodate his chair so he stayed in Jericho with his old supervisor, who opened a good bottle of wine for him and managed to drink his half without asking what exactly it was Charles got up to these days.

It was difficult getting around the city by himself, though he’d insisted on going alone – too much trouble to take Hank away from the school at the beginning of term, and he hadn’t had a quiet trip to himself in a while. Broad Street was too packed with new students and most of the college porters looked at him blankly when he asked to come in and didn’t bother to explain who he was. Charles supposed, not without some vanity, that he still looked too young to be a don – he wore a Carnaby Street suit to his talk and probably acted like he still had long hair. Still, he would’ve liked to see more of the city, but perhaps it was for the best. Oxford at the start of Michaelmas made him feel grounded and a kind of safe he hadn’t fooled himself into feeling recently.

A crowd of eager students took him out to the Turf and fired him with questions until closing time – could he expand more on the ethical considerations of mutant-specific legislation? Was it theoretically possible to create an artificial mutation in a living person’s genetic structure? What did he think of this Magneto business? When are you going to tell us _you’re_ a mutant, Dr Xavier? one pretty graduate laughed, crossing her legs and leaning in so he could feel a touch of breath at his cheek. The crowd of students laughed and Charles buried his face in his pint. At this point in time, this was still a complicated answer and certainly not one for crowds.

He was phrasing possible answers half-aloud to himself as he made his slow way to the taxi rank, tipsy and sweating despite the October chill, and then, inevitably, Erik was just there, standing at the corner of Turl Street with a hat casting his face into shadow and the collar of his overcoat turned up like a film star villain.

Charles saw him a few hundred yards’ away and knew him at once by the set of his shoulders, an odd and unfamiliar first point of reference – he hesitated before locking his wheels and lifting two fingers slow, leaving them hovering beside his temple as a question.

Erik nodded.

_What are you doing?_

He fit in exactly where he always had, filling up Charles’ head entirely. More powerful mutants sounded louder but it was as though Erik had put down his own neural network. He was still good at this, confident and clear – most people fought an active connection instinctively, or simply dropped their guards and left him to sort through the noise.

_Keep going. I’ll follow you._

Charles snorted. _Don’t be paranoid, Erik_.

 _Says the man almost definitely unaware that he had two undercover police officers in his rapt audience this evening_.

This wouldn’t surprise him, Charles had to admit, but he let Erik feel the mental equivalent of a sigh as he moved forward, forcing himself not to turn his head and satisfy his curiosity.

 _I’m knackered_ , he grumbled as he went past. _Could you—?_ And instantly there was pressure at the back of his chair, enough to give the impression of the mechanical one Charles had optimistically left at home. Erik was far enough behind he couldn’t hear his footsteps but he was still there, solid and assuring and unnervingly comfortable in Charles’ head after so long a silence.

_Where are you staying?_

_Jericho._

_I’d like to talk privately._

_That’s for you to arrange,_ Charles snapped mentally. _If you’ve sophisticated enough methods to track my movements, you can surely—_

 _I read it, actually._ Charles got impression of faint wickedness, the edges of Erik’s lips curling. _In_ Der Spiegel _. Complete coincidence. Some old Oxonian advertising an academic degenerate on page sixteen_. Erik’s own memory of the newspaper page, folded on his lap in some city café, drifted up helpfully.

Not Kazakhstan, then. He gritted his teeth and directed the cab driver towards a little hotel across the river, where he booked a room before he could think too long about it.

Erik’s quiet on-going presence was distracting to the point of jangling his nerves; he had to ask twice for his room number, only to be reminded by the bored-looking concierge who looked used to academics attempting shambolic trysts that it was printed on the key fob. Erik took his time – he sent impressions of the river footpath at night, moonlight lapping between crushed leaves – and arrived half an hour later.

He still hadn’t shaved and the reddish stubble still suited him, Charles thought, though he’d lost weight even past the lean, hungry slant he’d had when they last met. This, more than Erik’s actual presence and apparently random decision to see him, worried Charles – Erik’s history meant he was fastidious about food, snappish if he missed dinner. He shrugged off his coat and cast about the little room, checking habitually for the window and the door before settling on Charles with a small halfway smile.

“Well – hello.”

“This feels a little being kidnapped,” Charles accused, though he kept his tone light.

Erik nodded agreeably and crossed to sit on the opposite side of the bed, back to the headboard. “On your own dime – that sounds about right.”

“You’ve stayed out a long time,” Charles found himself saying, lifting his hand to his head abruptly without quite meaning to. He was out of practice – Erik was still there, like talking over a radio to someone in the same room but not. He could feel the steady murmur of Erik’s mind against his, too loud and intimate, but he was too curious, too curious and whatever else, to pull back.

“I needed to,” Erik said flatly, his gaze steady and serious. “You’re under close surveillance, and I don’t trust you not to speak to the wrong person.”

“Erik – Christ, I fucking _wouldn’t_ —”

“I know you wouldn’t, but the fact remains.” Erik eyed him in his chair, taking in his rumpled tie and slight flush. “For the best intelligence in the world, you’ve got a terrible sense of personal security.”

 _That’s a terrible come-on_ , he’d have said ten years ago, brazen and enjoying the reaction it would’ve gotten out of Erik then. Now he let the breath go out of him and pushed forward to haul himself onto the bed. Erik stayed still and watched him shrug off his blazer and undo his tie with an irritated huff. “What do you want?” Charles asked bluntly. “Besides the fucking security briefing.”

“I’d wanted to see your talk.”

Charles shot him an incredulous sideways glance; Erik shrugged. “But I’m not Mystique. She sends her love, I’m sure.”

“Doesn’t she?”

“I didn’t tell her I was coming. Expect she’d disapprove of time off – we’ve got a lot of things on right now.”

“So this is time off,” Charles said slowly. He suddenly itched for another drink; the pub seemed far off, and the hour much later than it probably was. He nearly started when Erik nodded and twitched his hand for the hip flask in his coat, sending it gliding Charles’ way.

“An evening, at least.”

“That’s fairly fucking unsettling, if you don’t mind me saying so. Not that it’s not a good surprise,” he added, gentler.

“I have business in London tomorrow,” Erik said by way of cold clarification, and Charles nodded – there it was – and took a swig from the flask. Vodka. Maybe he was in Kazakhstan after all.

Erik did not say that he missed him, or that he wanted to change anything at all – Charles felt himself wanting to say something just to make this all less strange and heavy in his stomach but it was objectively better like this.

They drank the rest of the hip flask and in place of politics Charles told him about the school, how some of the older children were doing and how they’d doubled enrolment and how they had a fucking camping trip planned for the end of the month – this, slightly inanely, but he felt himself talking and talking and enjoying the stillness in the lamp-lit room. He remembered Erik fidgeting sometimes, especially in small spaces – he paced when they argued, always – but that night he sat quiet alongside and in Charles’ mind and just listened. The only indication of his old habits was the flask that he kept drifting between them, but even this, Charles sensed, was quiet for him now. He no longer required conscious effort for small, technical tasks.

“And you?” Charles slurred, finally, and understood immediately from Erik’s face that he wasn’t going to be hearing details.

“I’m well.” Erik lifted a hand to cup Charles’ jaw and Charles relaxed, watching him. “I’m healthy. Doing work I feel good about. And I’m reading, a little – some of the things off the list you drew me up when we first met. Kipling, right now.”

“I would’ve thought too – imperial narrative. Certainly overtly racist.”

Erik snorted and touched his lower lip. “I like the stories,” he admitted. “Can I have the notes from your lecture? I did want to see it.”

“You’ve heard it all in much better detail.” _Are you staying the night?_ he asks, not speaking aloud so as to keep Erik’s hand against his face. _I’ve paid for the room_.

He did, of course, and was gone for London or Kazakhstan when Charles woke. This is not how he remembers them in entire but it is what wakes him with remembering now. Not that he can read minds anymore, Charles thinks, waking cold with his face to the car window and the dawn, but perhaps someone’s trying to tell him something.


	2. Chapter 2

Erik hasn’t needed to drive in years. Everything to him is a little foreign – the rules of the road, the billboards advertising everything from immigration lawyers to Justin Bieber to corn syrup. His latest prison stint was eighteen months, but he’d only ever had scraps of freedom before that, leaping from escape route to vital project on the backs of organised allies or his own powers. Little personal practical skills slipped through the gaps in between.

Driving has always made him feel entirely too human. He’s exhausted and horribly cramped bent over the steering wheel, his body too worn for this position after just an hour. Charles has been more alert since night wore off but is keeping mostly to himself in the passenger seat of the stolen Jeep with its intermittent heating and fuzzy radio. He asks a few questions – are you all right, have you eaten – though the obvious one stays where it is, and Erik gets no hint of the nudge that could initiate a mental conversation. Well. Let him wait. The answer is that they are going north: the rest buzzes audibly in the back of his mind, there for the reaching out and formulating when he needs it.

“We need to eat,” Charles murmurs eventually. They’re stuck in rush hour traffic on the Merritt Parkway and Erik is slumping over the wheel, chin on his forearms and something dull and heavy throbbing behind his eyes.

“We need to stay moving,” he grunts. “Logan will have that tracker after us. And whoever else after him.”

“Erik. I’m eighty-nine and fucking hungry.” His tone’s tired and too familiar, like he’s speaking to a wilful child. Erik grits his teeth and takes the next exit.

The last time they actually had a private conversation was three and a half years ago. April at the mansion, the week the daisies came out in a late and watery spring. Charles’ suggestion that he come for the school’s Passover dinner, knowing full well Erik had not been to a seder in years. It had been one of the few times Erik ever remembered taking a natural lead with Charles’ students – a few murmuring along with him saying Hallel, one gently correcting his Hebrew, Charles gamely trying gefilte fish for the thousandth time and making the students laugh with his involuntary face. I’ll see you very soon, Erik’d said in a rare bit of sentimentality when he left, and should’ve known better.

He doesn’t doubt that the school is gone, but even he can recognise that Charles cannot be asked right now. The human news’ self-satisfied interpretation will be inconsequential, anyway, by the time Charles is in a position to tell him.

The Jeep’s driver, in a stroke of luck, had had sixty dollars in his wallet when Erik left him unconscious down a Manhattan back alley some hours before. In more elegant circumstances, Charles would’ve done the honours, but there’s no sense in asking him to do anything more than navigate with the pills still in his system. After tolls they have somewhat less, so Erik pulls into a McDonalds and goes through the drive-thru, keeping his face averted out of habit as the woman at the window hands over two cheeseburgers and a chocolate milkshake.

They sit in the parking lot and eat in silence apart from Charles sucking down his milkshake. Erik eventually wipes his hands with a napkin and calculates the ache in his legs, stretches out underneath the dashboard and glances over.                              

“How did you know I was out, then?”

Charles spends a moment wiping his mouth, his gaze fixed out the smudged windshield at the grumbling morning highway. He looks odd like this. Erik’s gotten used to Charles’ age in the same way he’s reacquainted himself with his own face from glancing in the rearview mirror, eyeing liver spots with distrust and feeling for new lines, but Charles is wearing castoff jeans and an inexplicable Rolling Stones sweatshirt that he clearly didn’t choose himself, not to mention the three-day-old stubble. Charles has always been fastidious about his appearance but now he seems profoundly unselfconscious or just distracted.

“Intuition, I suppose.”

Erik scoffs and leans in. “I could feel you even with the pills, Charles, but you certainly don’t have that kind of conscious range. Especially at your age. Were you expecting me?”

Charles looks over at him, and there’s a sudden shrewdness there that hits Erik solidly in the chest. “Ye of little faith,” he sneers. “And with our history – I knew when you were in _Antarctica_ , in 1980. I always know. Not details, but even then I could tell you were in trouble. You remember.”

He does, and the specific date reassures him, but Charles isn’t finished; he lifts an eyebrow as he scrutinises Erik’s mussed hair and the bruises under his eyes, hands folding critically in his lap. “You wouldn’t be having trouble at _your age_ , would you – you didn’t used to have any reservations about abusing Logan to the best of your ability,” he points out. “And he certainly will be following us, God love him.”

“I see he still doesn’t regenerate those missing brain cells.”

“Not that it answers the question.” Charles sighs and finishes his milkshake, jamming it into the cupholder between them. “So you’re taking me home.”

“I suppose, yes.” Erik irritably pushes the heels of his hands against his eyes, which are beginning to unfocus permanently. Perhaps he should’ve spent a bit more money on coffee, though he can’t remember the last time he tasted it, or if it helped.

Charles’ hand gentle on his elbow, then his neck, thumb pressing below his ear. The dull drone of traffic beyond and the cold settling in without the running engine. Without quite deciding to, Erik does the habitual mental reaching-out – useless theatrics, nearly the equivalent of Charles raising a hand and willing metal to move – and gets a little warm wordless pulse in reply that makes him shudder. “You need to lie down in a bed,” Charles observes, tilting his head. “And have a shower. You look like you haven’t been lived in for a long time.”

“That’s very helpful,” Erik snaps, eyes still closed.

Charles’ lips twitch and he takes a breath, considering this. “I always know,” he says again finally, and Erik cannot tell if he’s being mocking or affectionate, but gradually he feels a conscious easing of the ache in his legs and back and senses Charles’ heavy concentration just beside him. Good. Better than the nothing he’d felt back in the flat, though providing this small distraction – he’s only dulling the sensation, not the ache itself – is clearly an effort for Charles.

“Fifteen minutes,” Charles murmurs. His fingers press briefly against Erik’s nape. “Put your seat back. McDonalds won’t mind.”

“We have to go. We’ve barely gone anywhere.”

“I can make you.”

“You can’t,” Erik snarls softly, and moves the metal lever on his seat as if this gives him the last word.  
  


* * *

  
“If you’re here for round two, you can piss off,” Caliban says. His voice is muffled behind the door. Logan exhales noisily and rubs his own forehead.

“Just open the door.”

There’s moment that stretches, then the clunk of a lock. Caliban looks sullen again, but has nothing to say as he moves away from the door and stalks off into the flat. Logan follows. The door clicks closed behind them.

It’s mid-morning. Caliban has drawn the curtains. His laptop is lying in bits on the floor, not like it’s been smashed but methodologically: parts separated out, tools in perfect neat lines. Logan spares a mistrustful glance for the display, and steps over it to drop a battered sports bag on the sofa.

“We’ve already lost time,” he mutters. “So. Uh.”

“He,” Caliban says, “really fucking got to me.”

“He – Magneto?”

Caliban gives a raspy and unmirthful laugh. “The Professor.”

“Oh,” Logan says. “Yeah. You uh. You get used to it.”

They haven’t made eye contact since Logan got in, and now it’s becoming a thing. Logan stares at the curtained window, then finally makes himself sneak a glance at Caliban. Caliban is frowning at the bag on the sofa. Then he tuts and says with an air of resignation, “Alright. I was a coward, and I screwed things up for you. Better?”

“I don’t care.”

“Right. So you’re going, then. To get them.”

“We’re going. I need you to tell me where we’re going.”

“What?” Caliban says. His gaze finally snaps to Logan’s. “What?”

Logan reaches over to the bag on the sofa and pulls out a bottle of sunscreen. Caliban stares at him open-mouthed and speechless. Logan is not sure if it’s performative sarcastic speechless or actual speechless. He tosses him the bottle, which breaks Caliban’s incredulous stare, making him scowl as he fumbles the catch. Logan walks over and claps him on the shoulder. “Oh,” he adds, squeezing, probably a little rough, “I got us a car, by the way. No paper trail.”

“No,” Caliban says. “No thank you. I won’t do it.”  
  


* * *

   
Assertive, Caliban thinks to himself, principled, self-respecting. Oh, very good, make your feelings known. Then tumble apart like the damp paper towel you resemble because the guilt on one side is just as bad as the guilt on the other, so why bother?

“Are you—”

Caliban’s eyes snap open to the gloom of the parking garage and he spears Logan with a furious look: “I haven’t even started, I can’t _do this_ if you keep—”

“Alright, alright,” Logan mutters, sitting back, and Caliban forces himself to close his eyes even though he hates to be under scrutiny the way he knows Logan is scrutinising him.

It’s not scent. He talks about it, thinks about it, as scent sometimes, because it’s the closest analogue he has words for. It’s psionic, it must be, but it’s not the smooth clean telepathy which Charles Xavier once possessed, if the stories are to be believed. When he’s not trying, it’s just another sense, a particular tickle at the back of his throat when Logan (smoke, a little sweet decay, hot metal and something—wooden, a taste that splinters) or any other mutant is around. When he’s actively stretching himself and _trying_ to find others, it’s a timebound synaesthetic sense-impression; it makes him vertiginous and unsure of the bounds of his own body and senses every time he hunts for someone. And Caliban has only ever really used it when in the employ of Transigen, and others. He grips the blanket that Charles Xavier had huddled under, raises it to his face and inhales in, and makes himself sink into the dark.

He can only bear a few seconds before he’s back in his body in the little van Logan’s scraped cash together for their fucking getaway, spluttering like someone just saved from drowning. He shudders and wipes his mouth on the back of his hand, but the taste there isn’t something he can scrub away. “McDonald’s,” he mutters.

“What?”

“It’s—that’s what I’m—shut up,” Caliban directs, and throws himself back down under even though he knows it’s a bad idea. He doesn’t want to be bad at this, this all-too-visceral gift he resents having and which remains one of the only decent cards dealt him.

Still there, though the taste’s been sitting in his mouth a while now. Tugging _up,_ which translates literally as north; a brief hiss over water that shifts the axis of orientation. Asleep. Shoulder contorted, a dull ache that sets Caliban’s teeth on edge by proxy. And suddenly Charles is there, again, unconscious but pulling insistent and frighteningly immovable at the same threads that threaten to unravel.

“Fuck,” Caliban gasps. Logan’s hand closes on his shoulder and steadies his skull as it knocks involuntarily against the seatback; when Caliban struggles back through a beat later and opens his eyes, Logan’s close, holding his head and examining him with concern that doesn’t feel as humiliating as it might.

“Are you okay?”

He fights the sudden inexplicable urge to laugh — no one’s ever asked this at this particular stage, obviously — and grits his teeth. Logan keeps hold of him as he takes a few breaths, which is also strange.

“Connecticut,” he says finally, and looks over at Logan. “Or – Massachusetts. I don’t know how much help I’m going to be. He’s – I don’t know exactly what he’s doing, or if he realises he’s doing it, but.”

Logan raises an eyebrow and snorts, sliding his hand away. “That close? They’ve been gone hours.”

“That’s the last I can get of Charles – so maybe not. It’s harder when they’re unconscious. Magneto's – telepaths are easier, see-"

“ _Unconscious-?_ ”

“He’s asleep.” Caliban wrinkles his nose. “No drama. They’re old pals, aren’t they?”

Logan grumbles and leans back in the driver’s seat, stretching his arm across his chest and yawning lion-like as though to clear his ears. He’s one of the few people Caliban knows who prefers a given name to the one other mutants gave him, and he can see why – the comparison is often irresistible. “You could say that,” he growls.

Ah. “Really?” Caliban says, with some genuine interest. “What, still?”

“I don’t fucking know,” Logan snaps, and visibly stops himself against the wheel — arms locked, shoulders dropping with a breath. Sometimes, Caliban wonders vaguely if they’d fucked in the first place because Logan had known he’d need him at some point, but it’s this sort of instant embodied habitual frustration that makes him suspect otherwise. Nothing about Logan suggests he has plans beyond, perhaps, on a good day, a next meal. He is terrifyingly short-term. He is probably not even considering the strangeness of this, the overthinking Caliban is doing at what they, barely-even-friends with benefits, are doing. “Charles didn’t – he doesn’t talk to people about that. It’s been years, as far as I know. Do you know where we’re going?”

Caliban watches him a moment and opens the door. “Drive north. I’ll text you if I can get a clearer fix. Try to avoid any off-roading, please.”

The engine roars to life the second he’s in the back of the van, the only tiny window thoroughly taped up by Logan. Caliban settles into a corner and braces himself as they lurch up the ramp and through the stop-start of the city. Just like old fucking times, though at least Logan’s thought to leave him a few bottles of water and a blanket, a different blanket, one that isn’t replete with the psychic stink of a man who was once the world’s most powerful telepath. Caliban wishes these small concessions were no comfort, but they are: so he decides he might as well get comfortable with these little luxuries and his own low standards.  


* * *

   
They have to stop again. And again. Once to make use of a gas station toilet. Once for a coughing fit which Erik tries to swallow down and which nonetheless racks him so hard his grip goes unsteady on the wheel. “Stop, stop, _pull over_ ,” Charles almost shouts at him.

When he does, he gets out of the car as quickly as he can, his left knee popping and his lungs screaming for cold air. He slams the door behind him, muting Charles’ continued and infuriating concern, and braces his forearm against the Jeep’s side, head bowed and wrist pressed to his mouth as he coughs. Cars whip by on the freeway winding between low hills, the New England sky grey and flat.

They’re going so slowly. He takes a rattling breath and hits his sternum with an open palm, more out of frustration than a belief that he can clear his chest that way. Too often these coughing fits come upon him. He hates it. Unlike Charles, he never even entertained a youthful period of serious smoking. He thinks that and then he’s angry at his own self-pity.

His breath hitches once, twice, then eases. Erik allows his shoulders to relax. It’s the New York smog and a little temporary weakness from prison food and suppressant medications, that’s all. A mere five minutes lost, if that. He takes a few more breaths of cold air and then turns to grasp the handle of the driver-side door, but before he can the window rolls down. Charles is stretched across the driver’s seat to reach the controls. “Do you need more time, Erik?” he asks, and Erik—fuzzy-headed still, a little under-oxygenated—nonetheless picks up something wrong in Charles’ tone, something pointed and cold and almost cruel.

He opens the door. Charles leans back into his own seat with a little huff of effort. “I’m fine,” Erik mutters, folding himself reluctantly back into the Jeep and into the now-hated driver’s seat.

“You’re procrastinating.”

Erik makes the door swing shut without touching it. The rush of cars outside is immediately dampened. “What?”

“And going the wrong way.”

Charles has accused Erik of many things over their long affiliation—a mental phrasing which, if Charles could only hear it, would probably deserve all the predictable censure he’d heap upon it. Charles has accused Erik of megalomania, selfishness, recklessness, using all the hot water, overworking, undersleeping, cruelty, viciousness, tenderness, sentimentality and genocidal tendencies. But, “Procrastinating?” Erik asks.

“Home, you said,” Charles tells him. “We’ve crossed the state line. I just saw the sign. Erik, why are we not going to the school?”

Erik is silent, his mouth slightly open. Charles stares at him, red-rimmed eyes insistent and wide.

“Erik. _What have you done_?”

Their minds are not connected but there is suddenly something large and cold yawning in Erik’s chest, the way iron feels when it goes brittle.

Abruptly Charles is pushing at his mind, forceful and agitated and _scrabbling_. Ugly and erratic like rat claws. There is nothing familiar about this – nothing like when they were younger and genuinely stretched their powers against one another, nothing collaborative or destructive or intentional, as if a lesser telepath has taken a messy and anonymous drill to his head. Erik cries out and grabs his temple with one hand, reaching for Charles’ shoulder with the other.

_Stop. Stop it stop-  
_

Passover at the mansion, a woman not meeting his eyes as she passed him a plate. Mystique gasping on the floor as her eyes changed colour. A bridge white-hot and unnatural on fire. The tugging lurch in his gut as Cerebro leapt forward towards – two steps from cold downpour to the lights of the Moscow underground; students pulling out their chairs for his wheelchair; his mother three days without food looking hunted as she turned up the collar on his coat.

“Charles,” he hears himself croak. “Get out-”

_You-_

Charles’ face rounder and easier, grinning over the top of his book from bed. A figure in the doorway crumpling like she’s been shot. The images wrench unnaturally into one another; Erik’s stomach heaves and the door collapses to bury him. A shriek is building and building somewhere outside of himself.

The CD player forcibly ejects itself from the Jeep’s forward console and he hears Charles gasp. The whole body of the car shudders and groans, the most Erik’s managed in some time, and he tastes blood; besides him, Charles gags and spits reflexively, a mental echo that turns into an incredulous dry sob.

“Erik – _Erik_ – oh, Jesus, Jesus-”

 _Please don’t_ , he manages to formulate into a focused thought, and gets nothing in response. It is as if that part of his mind’s been abruptly switched off.

“What did you _do_ -”

Focus inwards: the wheel under his hands, the ache in his back. The muffled hiss of cars passing. Charles’ moaning sliding into sounds he recognises from old men he knew when he was a boy, the ones who died first. Panic spikes up through him and he throws his consciousness abruptly into the body of the car – steel, aluminium, titanium, iron, copper wire, worked over three times and still hot from travel – dents in the bumpers he evens out without thinking about it. No gap in his mind. No spaces where there shouldn’t be.

Charles is still sobbing garbled words, his shoulders folded up and his thin body racked with hiccupping breaths. “Shut up, for God’s sakes,” Erik snaps, gasping at his own breathlessness. “Calm down. Here-”

He finally manages a reach and grabs his hand. He hasn’t touched him like this in a while – Charles’ fingers clutch and hold, his knuckles tangible and frail in Erik’s grip, and, oh, he is so fucking desperate, eyes rolling back to focus on his face as he pants wet and open-mouthed. Erik is old but he’s known few old men over his lifetime; he cannot recognise Charles in this.

_Please. Please. Not you, like this, of all-_

“I can hear you,” Charles chokes, his brows drawing together suddenly terrible and racked with effort. He growls. “I’m sorry-” _I’m sorry – I -_

_What’s easier?_

“Aloud – this. The school-”

Erik shifts painfully in his seat to face him. He is all pale and gone, the question slipping from his glazed eyes along with his energy, blinking at Erik’s thumb on the papery back of his hand.

“I don’t know what happened,” he murmurs, and this, at least, is the truth. “I’m sorry, Charles. I heard scraps on the human news, but nothing I believed – I would tell you if I knew anything real. I don’t. Beyond that it’s-”

“You – told Caliban you did. I heard you. You didn’t think I knew – I knew you were there. I knew when you walked in. I knew before.”

“I lied.”

“You should’ve made him tell you,” Charles hisses.

“I needed him to let me take you with me. That was all I could _fucking_ _do_.”

A horn blares distantly on the highway and a motorcycle roars past. Charles’ gaze goes distant on the dashboard, his forehead furrowing and his teeth half-bared. He switches abruptly and his mental voice is several decades younger, simultaneously unsettling and something that soothes Erik’s aching insides for a moment:

_They had me on drugs. The same suppressants you have in your system._

“Yes,” Erik says. Speaking aloud is easier. His head is throbbing.

_I can’t remember, Erik. Nothing before a few days ago-_

“Slow down,” he says warningly, squeezing his hand. This is nearly familiar – experimenting, overstepping, knowing when to touch and steady or lend a mind. The first person whose powers he knew as well as his own. “You’re not focused.”

 _I’ve never felt like this_. _It’s not like – a telepathic block, Cerebro overloading, anything in that genre._ He frowns, and it is briefly like the Charles in the car with him is an entirely different person, removed from the more sensible, academic memory speaking Erik’s head. _Where are we going, then?_

 _I need your help to find it_ , Erik admits. _There are places for mutants in this country besides the school. Still. But I’ve been gone a long time._

More of an idea than words, weary and heavy, as Charles’ head thumps back against the seat: _I am the only one you have left._

They spend the last of the Jeep driver’s money at a tiny motel two state lines later just as night is falling. Charles is passed out and Erik is nearly there; he manages the metal wheelchair on his own, but has to get the middle-aged man at reception to help him take Charles out of the car.

“Your partner?” the man asks sympathetically, eyeing the skeletal, imposing old man in the mismatching clothes and deciding not to offer him the walker behind the front desk. He limps stiff and close behind the wheelchair as if held upright by it.

“Yes.”       

“You folks come far?”

“Quite a drive.”

“You got much further to go?”

“Not much, no.”

“You got a good GPS, huh?”

“He’s my navigator. We’ll be out early in the morning.”

He accidentally jolts the wheelchair going up the ramp. The bald man doesn’t stir. “Where exactly you coming from? Did you hit that bad traffic on 90?”

“Just give us the fucking room,” comes the low snarl behind him, and though the old man must be pushing over ninety, there is something unnerving in how straight he stands and the accented edge to his deep voice.

The receptionist recognises him from somewhere, he thinks, but this close to the highway he’s learned not to ask questions.  
  


* * *

  
Caliban continues to surprise him, sometimes. He uses hand emojis to communicate small ideas like _okay_ and _no_ and _close enough_ ; Logan, who is not used to texting and driving, has to pull over occasionally and call him to confirm he’s going the right way or he’s read that right. It’s awkward – he can hear his voice echoing faintly from the back of the van – and he gets the sense Caliban is faintly amused with him beneath the serious face he’s putting on. He doesn’t have as much at stake. But he doesn’t sneer too much as he explains his directions, doesn’t go looking for Logan’s limits as he often does. He is trying, and that’s what surprises.

He’d run into Caliban, or someone who was probably him, twice before their current circumstances. Both times he’d been away from the school, once on a vacation and the second time after he quit and gone west for a while. The second time had been the dicey one. Logan has never had any illusions about the country he lives in or being wanted dead but it’d almost surprised, this time, being woken in the middle of the night by helicopters and police dogs in the little cabin he’d rented in the Colorado Rockies. He’d started to assume they’d stop fucking bothering.

It had taken three days to shake them – mountains, Denver, didn’t matter – and only stopped when he got back on a plane to New York. “Come home,” Charles said firmly on the phone when he called angry and embarrassed and asking for advice. “It isn’t safe out there anymore.”

“What do you know,” he’d snarled, but done it anyway.

Charles, it turned out, did know. He rarely used Cerebro anymore but he still knew a few people in government. Reports of a tracker on-hire for Transigen. “Disgraceful,” Charles said, shaking his head in the car coming back from the airport, “that a mutant might be taking on this kind of work voluntarily. It’s truly worrisome.”

“You sound like Magneto,” Logan pointed out wryly, and watched Charles’ eyebrows contract involuntarily.

“People are supposed to get less radical as they get older,” Charles murmured. “Would you say you’re an exception to that rule, Logan? Or are the times really that strange?”

Logan can’t remember what his answer was. A skeptical look, a grunt, a shrug, something like that: _times’ve always been strange_ , maybe. A change of the subject.

The first time he and Caliban had met face to face had been a misunderstanding in a bar. Logan had looked up from his drink and caught Caliban staring at him from the corner. Caliban hadn't looked away quite quickly enough. Mutant, Logan thought immediately, seeing that the stranger’s skin was not just pale but colourless white. Then he wasn't so sure. This was just months after police in Georgia had shot a black man born with a facial deformity. Totally human. In the trial, the officer had defended his decision to shoot by saying he thought the man looked mutant, was going to do something unnatural. He'd been acquitted. Stories had begun to surface of humans who didn't look human enough to get jobs or benefits.

So. Maybe not mutant. Logan decided not to care, and went back to his drink, back to half paying attention to the news on the TV. But the pattern repeated itself, Caliban always the one looking and Logan always the one catching it.

Logan wasn’t interested, got nothing of what he liked from Caliban, no sense of easy confidence or casual brutality; resolved not to look back, except of course he broke that resolution as he broke most resolutions, and found that Caliban’s blue-white stare had changed. No longer curious, his unfamiliar face was now set in an expression of strange defiance and concern. His jaw was clenched and he didn’t look away when Logan met his gaze.

Weird. Logan got another beer. Concentrated on it hard as the stranger got up, approached. Projected don’t-do-it hard enough that all the other patrons of the bar became very interested in their drinks, too, or in the grain of the sticky wooden tables they were sitting at. “Excuse me,” said the stranger.

“No.”

“Look, don’t ask how I know this, please, but there are two people looking for you.”

“Just two?”

“They’re coming here. They’re about,” and Logan, who was still staring into his glass, heard a faint sniff, “ah, five minutes away?”

“Great. Thanks for the heads-up. Now fuck off.”

“At least don’t let them find you _here_.”

That gave Logan pause, made him glance around at his surroundings. He liked this bar. It was quiet and cheap and the other regulars knew his face but didn’t feel the need to make conversation. It had never tried to run an open mic night or serve complicated food, and a couple of times when he’d stayed long after it had been emptied of casual drinkers, the owner had turned a blind eye to Logan lighting cigars inside. And he had never been in a fight here.

He finished his beer and got up. “Any more details?” he said. Caliban just got out of his way, avoiding his eye; tall, but stooped, and keeping himself in as small a space as possible. It had been Caliban’s demeanour _—_ insistent, worried, but mundanely so, as if warning of impending violence were familiar to him _—_ that had made Logan take his advice seriously.

A few days later he found his way there again. Raining outside, his boots leaving damp prints on the floor and his hair dripping down the back of his neck. He rummaged in his pocket for money, nodding to the man behind the bar. “Usual,” he said.

Instead of reaching for the tap, the bartender said, “Some folks were looking for you.”

Fumbling coins. Logan ground his teeth together. “Yeah?” he muttered, not looking.

“Yeah. Just after you left Thursday.”

“They cause trouble?”

“Just asking around. Looking for a short guy with sideburns.” Logan shot the bartender a questioning glance, and got a sharp snort of laughter in return. “No. Never seen anyone like that in my life,” he said blithely, picking up a glass. “They looked, uh. Rough. Mutant types. Figured you wouldn’t want that trouble.”

“Yeah,” Logan said, after a moment. “Guess I wouldn’t.”

He’d found them, a few days after. Small time gangsters _—_ they called themselves ‘representatives’ of some mutant society or group or something like that, which was how he knew they’d drunk a whole jug of their own Kool-Aid. They’d heard some mixed-up rumour about the Wolverine and power-suppressant drugs and made some wild assumptions about what his presence in a local bar might mean for their shitty playground politics. It had been a frustrating, brief and unsatisfactory scuffle. Logan had resolved to be more careful about the drugs he was investigating for Charles.

To Logan’s surprise, Caliban didn't avoid the bar in the weeks to come. One night, pretending not to be aware of him was putting Logan off his beer, so he took the seat by him and nodded. Caliban told him his name and seemed to wait for Logan to make a connection with it, which pushed him to think. A few old memories tumbled free; a couple of rumours, Charles’ disapproval _—_ disgraceful.

Caliban’s eyes were narrowed and he was watching Logan very carefully, wary but also a little defiant. Ready to snap back at accusations. Logan sniffed, chewed the inside of his own mouth, and said, “Guess neither of want to stop drinking here, huh?”

After a few seconds of silence, Caliban said, “Best not to leave it at awkward silences, then,” voice tart and eyebrows raised, looking a little shocked but not doing a terrible job of hiding it. And a few nights later Logan had walked home with him. And it had all been easy enough, mundane and clumsy enough to be reassuring.

Logan is jerked from his remembering by a loud thud behind him. He swears and brakes, yells, “Caliban?”

A muffled shout - irritated, not panicked- “Check your phone!”

Logan does, and has to squint a little bit to make it the text come into focus; what’s the green background for, who does it help? Fucking headache. Caliban has texted: _collision on I-84 E. Will be traffic +_ and then an emoji Logan takes a moment to realise is a police siren. As Logan holds the phone, it vibrates again; Caliban has sent, _New Britain? You people._

 _Canadian_ , Logan reminds him. _Whats our route then_

_Yeah, sorry. Ok take exit 32 coming up in ten mins. What’s the weather like out there?_

_Still sunny_

_Fuck’s sake._

Logan smiles, then catches himself doing it, feels weird about it; is left with a skewed expression on his face, not sure whether to scowl or grin. He accelerates instead, though he shouldn’t when he has one eye on his phone. Taps out _Thanks for directions_ then deletes it, texts _Real nice day_ instead, and on impulse raises his phone to take a picture of the sun-drenched late-afternoon road beyond the windscreen, just in time to see the motorbike making an over-confident attempt to overtake.

He swerves to the right to avoid clipping the bike’s back wheel. “Fuck-!" The van’s wheels skip and bounce across asphalt, swinging too far, eventually coming to a stop by the side of the road with a squeal of brakes. A cloud of black pain blossoms and recedes behind Logan’s eyes in glitchy fast-forward speed and he finds he’s slumped over the wheel, whiplash already unravelling.

“Shit,” he says, sitting up groggily. There’s a smear of blood on the wheel where his forehead smacked into it but the cut’s already sealed with the usual slight itch and sting. So Bri’s fucking car guy doesn’t do airbags. He growls and shakes his head to clear it. Then: “Shit! Caliban?”

He jumps out of the cab and grabs the side door of the van, yanking it aside; from the gloom beyond, he hears Caliban gasp and say, “ _No no no_ ,” and he winces, pulling it hastily shut again. Leaving a crack that he leans into.

“You okay in there?”

“No!” Caliban yells, sounding more infuriated than hurt, which Logan takes as a good sign.

“Jesus. Alright, can you move somewhere you’re not going to get _—_ you know, out of the light? So I can get in there?” Caliban doesn’t answer, but Logan hears him exhale through his teeth, and hears him shuffle about, relocating himself. He cracks open the door just enough that he can squeeze through, leaves it open so there’s just a thin line of bright light across the floor and wall. Caliban is a barely-discernable dark shape in the corner, so Logan traipses over and hunkers down by him, trying and failing to make out his expression. “Hey. Sorry. Fuckin’ motorbike. What’s up?”

“Caught myself on my wrist when you had your little _Fast and Furious_ moment up there,” Caliban spits, audibly strangling down pain. He’s gripping his left forearm.

“Fuck. Can you uh, can you move it?” Logan reaches out to touch Caliban’s arm and realises there’s actually nothing he can do no matter what’s wrong. He’s never really needed to know how to respond to minor injuries.

“Ugh. Yes,” Caliban says, after a few moments of winces and hisses and pops of bone, his breath hiking with pain. “Yeah.”

“And your fingers?”

“Mm.”

“Okay.” Logan tries to think. “Yeah, you’re fine. Right? It’s fine. It’ll be a bad sprain or something.”

There’s a moment, and then Caliban laughs. It’s a little spiky with pain, but mostly genuine. “You _arse_ ,” he says, weary and something else too; the dark makes Logan hyperaware of the ways in which Caliban talks, the contesting currents of warmth and spite. “You’ve got no bloody clue, have you? Just have to be the hero.”

“Fuck off.”

“Can’t. It’s a _real nice day_ out there.” Caliban borrows his accent, briefly and very badly.

Logan grunts and rolls his eyes and leans back against the side of the van, sliding down to sit instead of crouching awkwardly over Caliban. He lets his head loll back. It’s not comfortable but it’s good to be out of the driver’s seat. Caliban exhales noisily next to him and leans, a little, puts his right shoulder against Logan’s left. “Just give me five minutes,” he says. “It’s not that I’m not – I am trying, Logan.”

“Yeah, I know,” Logan says, and doesn’t ask again if Caliban’s okay because if he’s not they have to keep driving anyway. Caliban takes a few deep breaths and they sit in silence, until he nudges Logan gently.

“Go on then. Directions still stand. They stopped for a bit. I reckon we could catch up with them before it gets dark.”

“I never pegged you for a fucking optimist,” Logan grumbles, fingers finding Caliban’s uninjured wrist just for a second and squeezing before he moves back into a crouch.

“And you told me you could drive,” Caliban responds, not missing a beat, huddling back into the corner and for lack of a better phrase making himself comfortable, then tensing. Looking up. “Wait. I found something you should see. Just before _—_ I was going to make you pull over to look at it.”

“What?”

“It’s best if you just look,” Caliban says, plucking his phone from his pocket with his good hand. He’s unlocked it and is handing it over when he jumps, immediately crowding himself back into the corner. Logan hears what he’s heard: the crunch of tires slowing down, a vehicle being parked behind the van.

“Shit,” Logan says, going to the van door, checking Caliban’s out of the way of the light before hauling it open and jumping down, rattling it closed behind him. The car that’s pulled over is silver and unmarked save for a red and blue light bar atop it, dormant now. Logan nearly kicks the wheel of the van in frustration but stifles the urge. He knows the unreleased anger must be practically radiating from him though, and doesn’t try to smile lest it leak out through clenched teeth.

“Officer,” he says. Eyes carefully not on the trooper’s eyes as the man slams his car door shut, shoulders held hunched and tight.

“You in some trouble here?” The cop’s face is broad and blank, his eyes hidden by mirrored sunglasses that reflect the brilliant day.

“Close call with a bike. Took myself off the road. It’s fine.”

“Took out your left headlight.”

“Ah, shit,” Logan said; he hadn’t realised that. He knows he’s being twitchy and he knows it’s suspicious but if he could turn off looking shady he’d probably have had an easier time of it this past century and a half. He scratches at the side of his head, still not meeting the trooper’s eye. “Yeah, I’ll...I’ll get that fixed soon as I can. Listen, thanks for stopping. I should get on.”

The cop shifts his weight, hands on his hips. “Got a license I can check?”

Logan hates how that makes him swallow, a familiar coldness settling on his shoulders. Even though he does. He has a goddamn license and it’s in the glove compartment and it contains all the right information, except for the falsified birth date and the fact he never actually took any test. He grunts in the affirmative, indicates he’s got to grab it; the trooper, accustomed to such gestures, just nods and waits.

Logan’s leaning over to snap open the glovebox when he hears the trooper start to open the van’s side-door. He gets out, barks, “ _Hey_!” but it’s too late; the trooper’s already backing up, one hand on his gun, saying, “What the _fuck_?”

Logan slams the door. “Hold up, hold up,” he says. “Officer, my friend has a medical condition-”

“What fucking mutie bullshit-?”

The van is blocking them from the view of the highway. That’s good. Logan resolves to keep it that way. He advances. Hands up. “It’s, uh. It’s the one where he can’t go out in sunlight-” There’s a name for it and he tries to think of it “-photo-something, look just. Close that door and let’s talk-”

“Are you giving me orders, you son of a bitch? You in there, get the hell out. Get out.”

“Caliban, stay put,” Logan says loudly. “Listen. Listen, man. We’re not doing anything. We’re just driving. I’m asking you to-”

The trooper’s gun is out. Logan says, “Oh, fucking come on,” and then a plastic 500ml bottle of water flies from the van and hits the officer in the shoulder, makes him jump and gives Logan enough time to start forwards, claws bursting from between his knuckles.

There’s a metal whistle and the gun falls in two neatly sliced pieces at the floor. He backs the cop up against the side of the van with his forearm in his neck, slides his claws back in and clocks him in the jaw. The man goes limp. Logan sags too.

Cloaked in the ratty blue blanket Logan left in the back of the van, Caliban pokes his head out. “Tell me you didn’t just—”

“He’s unconscious.” Logan bends his knees and scoops the trooper up over his shoulder; his back twinges and he grimaces, but he takes the time to pick up the water bottle while he’s at it. “I had it,” he adds to Caliban, who sneers at him, catches the water bottle.

“You’re _welcome_ , Logan, it was a _pleasure_..."

Quick as he can, Logan puts the trooper back in his car, takes his keys and his phone and rips out the page of the notebook on which he’s taken down the van’s license plate. Over the police radio a woman with a faint Southern accent mumbles through a mouthful of static. Logan slides his claws out, ready to put them through the radio and shut her up, when she says, _puts him at 91 years old, and believe me I thought that was a typo too_. _Be alert, but do not approach without specialised back-up-_

She’s talking about Magneto.

_-and the division’s saying don’t hesitate to check the mutant registry if-_

_Then_ Logan slams his claws into the radio. It fizzes and sparks, the woman’s voice vanishing. He slams the door, then opens it again to search the glovebox. Cigarettes, chips, jerky, first aid kit. He grabs all of them. Dusk is coming down fast; the cars that swing by have their headlights on, cutting long swathes of light across the bluish road.

He thinks about sirens and dogs, and how much goddamn money the police and the military seem to have for these occasions. A 91 year old. Specialised back up. He doesn’t feel pity for Magneto but for Charles’ sake he hopes he still knows how to avoid arrest.

Logan gets back in the van. Caliban is sitting in the passenger seat, blanket still wrapped around his shoulders, scrolling aimlessly on his phone. In the light, Logan can see that his left wrist is coming up purple and black. Matches his bruised fingers on that hand. He looks up when Logan gets in.

“Okay,” Logan says. “We’re not going to be in the country for much longer.” He hands over the food, dropping it in Caliban’s lap, and opens the first aid kit. “Dinner.”

“You spoil me,” Caliban says, putting away his phone.  “I’ve been looking for new routes. Quieter routes.”

“Slower routes? Give me your wrist.”

Caliban twists so he can extend his left arm. “You say that like we actually know exactly where we’re going. I have a vague direction, not a bloody zip code. Logan, usually I’ve done this in cities, and what I’ve provided has been _part_ of the intel people have used. Not all of it.”

Logan casts a curious eye over Caliban. He talks about his past, sure, in the way certain mutants do: macabre, revealing before anyone can ask, revealing too much, anything to avoid the accusation of being ashamed. He doesn’t usually talk about the practicalities or the mechanics. Logan crunches a single-use icepack in one hand and lays it over Caliban’s wrist. No broken skin. Fine. Probably fine. There’s not really anything else he can think of doing. Caliban’s still talking; “—interference from him. And — speaking of the Professor, Logan, you need to-”

“They’re looking for Magneto,” Logan says.

“I know,” Caliban says, his voice quiet, and he passes over his phone. Logan has to squint, bring it close to his face to see what’s on the screen. Caliban leans back over into his own seat, holding the icepack to his wrist with his other hand and staring at the window _—_ but not before he pats Logan’s knee, strange and awkward, as if in apology. So Logan knows, before his eyes focus on the headline, that something is wrong.

He lowers the phone, flexes his right hand; wants to thump the wheel, doesn’t want to deal with Caliban going glassy and unimpressed when he thumps the wheel; then does it anyway, hard enough that there’s a loud pop of bone. “Fuck it. Fuck it!”

“We’ve got to get off the main roads,” Caliban says. “They’ll be looking for mutants, and.” He shrugs, looks between them, doesn’t have to say more. “I’m sorry.”

The article on Caliban’s phone is brief: this is a developing story, please check back for updates. It details in concise, clear wording the circumstances under which Erik Lehnsherr, also known as Magneto, escaped from prison some two days ago, alongside the few facts available to the press about what they have begun to call the Westchester Incident. And it mentions Charles’ name; in fact it mentions that Charles is suspected of direct involvement in the disaster, mentions Charles’ and Erik’s ‘long history’.

Caliban is talking. He’s using his getting-through-to-Logan voice. Logan chews the inside of his cheek and grips the wheel so hard his knuckles blanch.

“Take the exit, like I said. We’ll go on from there, I think – northwest. Towards Route 8. If we take a varied route I should get a better idea of what we’re looking for anyway.” Logan turns the key, but Caliban stops him before he can drive off: “Come here a moment.”

“What?”

“You’ve got _—_ here.” Clumsy and one-handed, Caliban has unscrewed the top of his bottle of water and is wetting his fingertips, reaching over to press them cold against Logan’s forehead and cheek. Getting the blood off, Logan guesses belatedly. He jerks his face away after too long a moment, scowling and scuffing at his own face with his knuckles to satisfy Caliban’s vague and inconsistent fussiness.

“Okay, okay. Leave it.”

“Fine, then. Drive. We’ve come this far.”

So Logan drives; lets Caliban navigate for him from the passenger seat, using a mix of Google maps and whatever hunting-dog sense his mutation gives him. It’s a lengthy and circuitous route that takes them back into New York State, dips them east and west with Caliban’s roundabout sense of navigation. Caliban winces at every pothole and goes through a few more ice packs, but doesn’t complain as much as Logan had anticipated. Mostly keeps to himself and his phone, eats most of the chips.

“He’s like family to you,” he says at one point, fake-idly, looking out of the window instead of at Logan. “How did that all happen?”

Logan grimaces, squints at the road ahead of them. Caliban already knows the story. Caliban is a magpie for information about mutants, pecking urgently at every little glimmer he can find and coveting his collection. He nests in the lives of strangers. Not that they’re strangers. “I want to find him. Not have a conversation about him.”

“Logan.”

“What.”

“I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but I’m on your side. You don’t need to fight me at every damn turn.”

Logan pushes his foot down, mutters, “Yeah, whatever,” and they fall back into silence.

It’s about midnight when Logan pretends to let Caliban win a protracted and increasingly hard-to-follow argument about pulling over, and then another twenty minutes before they find a truck stop. The smell of the all-night Burger King gets in easily, enough to make Logan’s mouth water and wake him up a little. Should have taken the cop’s wallet, but he has enough money on him to justify getting something hot to eat. When he comes back to the van clutching a paper takeaway bag and a cardboard cup of acrid coffee, Caliban is fast asleep with his mouth open, doesn’t even stir to hear the door open. As Logan eats, he notices that Caliban’s left hand isn’t looking good _—_ more, not less swollen than it was earlier, the stark black bruising alarmingly dark on his skin. There’s nothing Logan can do about that, so takes a gulp of coffee _—_ feels it in his teeth more than he tastes it _—_ and turns the key in the ignition. The van coughs back to life and Caliban mumbles something fretful and unintelligible but doesn’t wake.

Before he pulls out onto the road, Logan wipes grease off his fingers and sets an alarm on his phone, then googles _what time is dawn_ and adjusts it.  
  


* * *

  
Waking up with Erik in his arms in the most familiar and clear moment he’s had in a long time, though he’s not sure how long it’s been. Pine tree branches hiss against the motel window screen, casting uneven shadows over the bed; Charles blinks heavy-eyed at the dappled blanket, the shape of their bodies beneath, the sparse room with smoke-stained walls. It’s cold and smells like countryside out there, quiet and windy today. His head feels quiet too.

Erik is breathing audible through his mouth like always, face pressed against his front and a faint pocket of warmth trapped between them where Charles’ arm is slung over his too-prominent ribs. They’re both mostly dressed, Erik’s wispy grey hair mussed and sticking up, and there’s two pairs of trousers and a black coat that must belong to one of them tucked over his chair — more Erik’s style, Charles thinks.

Taking care not to move, he reaches out instinctively and feels the unusual depth to Erik’s sleep, a dream tangible and murmuring complex like a monologue heard from the theatre lobby. The corners of his own lips twitch and he lets his head back down to the pillow. Erik’s foot twitches against the coarse sheets.

The last time they were in the countryside was in France, or maybe Belgium, sometime just before 9/11 when you could still get a wheelchair through airport security without much fuss. Rare that he left the U.S. to look for students by that point, but it’d been Erik who’d found the mutant they wanted. Sixteen or seventeen, a haggard-looking boy who’d been locked in his parents’ basement for two weeks for lack of a better alternative (Erik’s barely-contained fury for this, his French brutal and fast, Charles’ restrained and rusty with a cautious eye on the parents). Charles can’t remember what it was the boy did. He forgets that more often than his students would ever guess.

But they’d had some time to themselves out there, somewhere near the mountains. Charles strokes Erik’s hair slowly back into place and watches the tree branch shadows blow across the ceiling. Practically something resembling a holiday. Not exactly like this.

He feels heavy and exhausted in his bones still and tries briefly to go back to sleep, but even through a layer of unconsciousness Erik’s anxiety about time buzzes unpleasantly. Charles yawns to clear his head and waits for a while.

His back aches. Caliban, more likely than not, has come sniffing around while he slept – fuck him, Charles thinks brief and savage, and hopes he came away with a headache. The quiet evidence of Erik knowing what he needs – chair close to the bed, the second pillow laid behind his head – is enough to taste indignation and something more sour in his mouth at the memory of Logan and Caliban’s idea of a bed. Logan, at least, should have known better.

The edges of Erik’s dream shift. Charles holds his head and smoothes his hand down his side, watching his thin face twist and sharpen and soften again as his hands twitch between their bodies. His jaw clicks shut and his eyelids flutter. Charles considers telling him to go back to sleep, or perhaps suggesting it in such a way that he won’t be able to argue, but he stays quiet and lets Erik emerge on his own time. He’s always hated mornings.

“Hullo,” Erik finally mutters groggily. “What time-?”

“I don’t have a watch. Or a mobile phone.” Without moving, Charles closes his eyes and reaches out – there’s someone a few buildings away, the motel reception. A microwave dings distantly and the neon screen changes behind reaching fingers. Instant coffee taste bitter on his tongue. “Quarter to eight, I think.”

Erik struggles upright, propping himself up on an elbow with some difficulty to peer down at Charles. “Are you-?”

 _Yes,_ Charles thinks, a little irritated at the now-familiar stop in the question. _All present and accounted for._

His lips part incredulously and fold into a little grudging smile that Charles returns, hand still on his hip. Erik doesn’t say anything, but rather brushes the back of his hand roughly against his cheek and examines him for a moment.

“I know we need to go,” Charles reminds him gently. “Find these people you’re looking for.”

“Yes.” Grey eyes flick thoughtfully; his mouth, his eyes. “I have missed this,” Erik remarks, and yawns into a small noise that turns into a stretch and groan. “Waking up to a resolved argument.”

Charles snorts. “Oh, yes. Do you remember, early on, I couldn’t get the phrase out of my head for an age – when you got all heated after that long-haul flight and said agreeing was better than sex? I used to think you’d eventually turn into a diplomat.”

Erik’s purring laugh is nasty and satisfying, his breathing harsh under Charles’ hand.

They splash water on their faces and Charles makes Erik brush his teeth with the little motel sink offerings. He still feels battered and stretched but he can see the effect of the night’s rest on Erik; the dark bruises under his eyes remain, but he’s coherent and almost chatty, casual again with how he moves their trousers from the floor by the belt buckles. Over a year, he realises, and feels a brief stab of guilt for forgetting – at least a year since his last visit to the prison, and likely very few other visitors in between. For someone whose mind only allows him talk to himself, Erik has always been good at keeping himself engaged and whole in the face of solitary confinement, but Charles knows from years of experience how he struggles to re-navigate touch.

On impulse he sends a brief, fond memory as Erik slowly gets dressed frowning at the mirror – younger, in his room at the mansion, Charles on his feet sliding arms around his chest to do his tie. Erik today starts visibly and catches his eyes in the mirror, brows furrowed and the lines of his face deepening into shadow.

“I need you to focus,” he says lowly, and Charles cannot tell if it’s an admonishment or something else.

They drive a little ways from the motel and pull off the road when they hit cornfields, grey-cracked stalks beaten down by last week’s snow and dusted now. Scrub-dark hills roll up on either side, the ominous beginnings of mountains that feel further from the endless motorway they left last night and far more unpeopled than they actually are. Erik switches the engine off, pulling the collar of his coat up to his ears, and the sound of their own breathing comes back gradually into the space it leaves.

“Unfamiliar territory,” Charles remarks, pulling the blanket Erik stole from the hotel up over his chest against the intermittent whispers of heat from the Jeep’s battered vents.

“We’re at the edge of the Green Mountains.” Erik rubs the bridge of his nose and reaches across to flick open the glove compartment, pulling out a battered map and peering at the front. A crow caws distantly going overhead and Erik’s head jerks up; Charles watches it go until it blurs from the limits of his vision. “I think,” he adds after a moment. “This is still your region.”

“Very topical. I was teaching the American Revolution last week. Edgar Allen and his Green Mountain Boys.”

Erik glances sideways at him, pursing his thin lips slightly. “How are you feeling, Charles? Honestly.”

He swallows an edge of impatience and breathes, reminds himself that he’s said he’ll do it, though in this quiet moment he cannot remember quite why – because Erik wants it, because it is safer, because Logan and Caliban are incompetent. Incompatible, rather, with what he and Erik have always inevitably fallen back into doing together. The ache behind his eyes won’t permit him to think further than that. “Fine,” he says curtly. “I can do it.”

“Yesterday – Charles-”

“Are you afraid I’ll hurt you,” Charles asks lightly, “or that it won’t work and you’ll have to go kidnap another telepath?”

Erik tilts his head back and gives him a long, flat look, harsh and grey in the early light. “Don’t be glib,” he says after a moment, and switches the radio on.

They figured this out in the early days of knowing one another as part of what Charles claimed was research for a paper he wanted to publish in about ten years, when things were all a little more out in the open, and what Erik ultimately (and correctly) understood as a kind of flirtation. Their abilities were not immediately compatible beyond Charles using Erik’s by proxy, but, Charles had argued, their levels of power meant that the _potential_ for collaboration was there. They just had to be creative about it.

Or literally-minded, as it turned out – Erik had suggested they look for areas of influence they had in common. This turned out to be something so basic – a pocket radio – that Charles had initially laughed at the idea. Several glasses of wine proved that between Erik’s capacity to alter the makeup of a metal antennae and Charles’ sloppy-but-there ability to interact with radio waves there was something to it. It was no substitute for Cerebro but there’s still a part of Charles that hasn’t gotten over Erik being the one to put his finger on it first. So obvious and yet not quite in accordance with the informal rules he was writing for them even then.

It starts with the mental connection. Erik is already forming context into a coherent thought for him, his mind open and sharper than yesterday, his eyes on him as Charles closes his in the deepening cold of the Jeep’s interior.

First impressions: a place Raven talked about visiting, some three decades ago when it was getting started. He catches a brief glimpse of her, middle-aged and heavy and bitter, and faintly feels himself grip the armrest. He cannot tell if the idea of the place made her feel hopeful or sad.

Memories of rumours filter in now, offering some concrete detail – Erik in the dark-lit back of a bar, more weight to his lined face and the man across from him smelling of fear. The White Mountains. Bumper sticker when you climb Mount Washington. City shelter bust-ups and whispers about going north. Following the North Star and off-the-grid GPS allotted to certain political spheres. A teenage girl with tattoos on her face looking up at him – Erik – and laughing harsh in his face. _They won’t be interested in anything_ you _have to say_. Police and the inside of what Charles understands was Erik’s jail cell, smaller and dirtier than what Charles could’ve imagined from that time in the visiting room.

“Oh-”

“Shut up, please, Charles. Focus.”

Gritting his teeth and then unlocking his jaw deliberately, he leans his head back against the seat and feels the edge of the radio noise.

A local station – a half-substitute in the space left by the NPR cut murmuring inaudible in the speaker but gradually coming into focus as Charles gathers up the ends of the sound and slides his mind into what feels like a narrow tube. His breath quickens and he feels Erik’s psychic nudge, asking the question – he shakes his head and listens until the words blur into a drone.

This isn’t nearly the same mental place as Cerebro. It’s more two-dimensional, like sliding a finger along a map, and so Charles slides himself north and skips over a few counties. He tries a specific image first – the girl with tattoos on her face – but only dull grey sound runs behind his eyelids. She is not in Vermont or New Hampshire or wherever exactly it is they’re going. Perhaps she never ended up there at all.

Something wavers in the radio connection; he opens his eyes and sees sweat has started to gather in the corners of Erik’s mouth. _Are you alright_ , he tries to ask, but Erik only twitches his lips and closes his eyes. The car’s antennae quivers in a non-existent wind. Focus, then, before Erik loses his energy again out of the drug come-down or old age or whatever this is – despite Charles’ own physical exhaustion this feels like surprisingly easy work, clear and specific, and so he allows himself to focus on the place Raven described. Her voice sounds in his mind and directs itself along the radio network with which he’s connected. It’s kind of a hippie commune, she tells Erik thirty years ago. For mutants. Maybe-

And then–

“I’ve got them,” Charles says, louder than he means to. A little unexpected bubble of pleasure warms his empty stomach: there are over twenty of them, not all hippies anymore but mostly over the age of thirty-five with a few exceptions, and they are less than two hundred miles away. He has faces and an image.

A quick mental leap slides this packet of information to Erik, who curses aloud and flinches visibly at the rapid-fire transfer; the antennae slashes fretfully and the radio suddenly squawks to full-blast.

_“-is why I wouldn’t call him inherently radical-”_

Charles snatches for the dial hastily to find a less painful volume and they sit back, Erik panting slightly and visibly resenting his own revived exhaustion as his grey face goes slightly pink.

_“But we have to acknowledge – I think we have to acknowledge that there’s probably a lot we just don’t know right now, Jerry.”_

_“They had an association, didn’t they? A-”_

_“Yeah, of course – a long-term professional relationship, just as most of the major Sixties civil rights leaders had. But I think we might see this encounter, if these reports are true, as being a definitive end to this era of mutant politics.”_

Erik snorts. “I know this one.”

“Who?”

He edges up the volume slightly and wipes his face on his sleeve. “Matthew Hynes. The human historian. At Dartmouth – he’s a _specialist_ , Charles, haven’t you heard?”

 _“Now that Lehnsherr is out_ -”

“Oh dear,” Erik sneers.

_“-and Xavier is suspected in his company-”_

“Oh,” Charles groans.

 _“-we’ve broken new ground. If Xavier is now also a wanted man, that’s unprecedented.”_  
_  
_ “Why’s that, Matthew?”

 _“Because he’s never_ formally _been on the wrong side of the law before, so to speak. This would signal both to mutants’ rights movements and to the government that even the most moderate strands of mutant politics and representation are no longer acceptable, for lack of a better word.”_

Erik laughs, not nicely, and switches it off. “And they’ve got _us_.” He clears his throat and raises a wry eyebrow at Charles, who lets his hand drop from where he's gone to turn it back on again. “This is the sort of person they roll out as experts these days. Charles Xavier, fugitive from the law –  _without precedent_."

“For fuck’s sake.” Charles pushes his tongue behind his front teeth and frowns. “It wouldn’t be Logan – Caliban must’ve-”

“It’s very unlikely to have been either of them,” Erik says brusquely, effectively ending this direly naïve, Charles realises, line of inquiry. He grips his head with both hands and pushes his thumbs bad-temperedly into his scalp with a grimace, his own version of Charles’ fingertips at his temple. “The White Mountains? Where’s that?”

Charles briefly considers asking and reluctantly concedes Erik’s expertise. “Not far. New Hampshire.”

“Not Maine?”

“ _How_ long have you lived in this country?”

“Sod off. Is it far?”

“Close enough,” Charles says, and surprises himself with how suddenly confident he feels. He reaches over and turns the key in the ignition so the Jeep gasps out a welcome lick of hot air. “Three hours, I’d guess. You can have a long sleep when we get there. They’ve got plenty of spare beds.”  
  
The station is still playing in his head, though the volume’s down so low Erik cannot hear it as the engine revs and they pull away. Charles decides not to relay the extra information. They will be there and _safe_ , as he understands from both the mental echo of Raven and Erik’s own present-day desperation, soon enough.


End file.
